Hair in War

“Hair, and what is done to it and by whom, is never really trivial.”

I have lived in Germany for three years. I’ve visited lots of museums and memorials in this time, which means I have learned a lot about World War II. I have seen, at these museums and memorials, countless black-and-white photographs. They show the war’s victims and its criminals and people that I guess fall somewhere between the two categories. People at rallies and parades and people in concentration camps and people just going about their business. When I look at the people in these photographs, I always notice their hair. I wonder how they did their hair—the mechanics of hairstyling are always mysterious and fascinating to me—and when I see, for example, a picture of a woman in a ruined, burnt-out street with her hair still set in perfect curls, I wonder why they did it, too. I often feel ashamed that, in my engagement with this time in history, and the dark part my adopted country played in it, I focus on something so trivial. But then, hair, and what is done to it and by whom, is never really trivial. In the Second World War, hair was vitally important, personally and politically.

I decided to gather stories about hair, especially but not only women’s hair, during World War II in Europe and the US.

The most iconic World War II hairstyle in the West, at least if YouTube tutorials and Pinterest boards are a reliable metric, is the victory roll. In one version of the style, the hair at the nape of the neck is twisted forward into a roll; in another version, rolls framed the face. In both styles, says Bethany Jane Davies in Vintage Hair Styles of the 1940s, the shape of the roll was meant to recall the circles of exhaust steam that trailed in the air after fighter planes executed an aileron roll, a maneuver usually performed in celebration of a victory. The exhaust steam rolls only hung in the sky a short time, but the rolls women wore in their hair were set so they would stay in place all day. In the UK, where rationing had turned commonplace hair products like setting lotions into luxuries, the rolls were often set with makeshift ingredients like beer or sugar water.

Even with rationing, however, hair could stay up-to-the-minute and fashionable whereas clothes, accessories, and cosmetics could not. As wardrobes were curtailed, hairstyles grew increasingly elaborate. The Purse Pompadour was hairstyle and accessory in one. As with a conventional pompadour, the hair was swept upwards and mounded high over the forehead; the Purse Pompadour left a fold concealed in the hair, large enough that a lipstick, a comb, even a coin purse could be tucked inside. Another popular hairstyle was the Bundles for Britain, where hair was worn in a voluminous bun, like a ball of wool, and stuck through with knitting needles, a follicular nod to knitting’s role in the war effort. Women in Allied countries were urged to “knit for victory.” (American women were, in fact, urged to “Remember Pearl Harbor, Purl Harder.”) Knitted goods were sent to soldiers at the front or, in “bundles,” to the Blitz-ravaged UK.

In Double Victory, Ronald Takaki notes that when war broke out, members of marginalized groups were expected to serve, often in segregated units, in their militaries; many gave up their lives in war for nations who had valued their lives very little during peacetime. In the US, the historically African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier started the campaign for a “double victory”: victory “without” for the Allied forces, to be followed by a victory “within” against systematic racism and oppression at home. To this end, some African American women adopted the Doubler, a style where the hair was arranged in two Vs.

In the late 1930s and early 40s, the movie star Veronica Lake popularized the peekaboo hairstyle. In the peekaboo, hair is worn parted to one side and a deep wave at the front falls over one eye, like Jessica Rabbit. This long, loose, vision-impairing hairstyle was unsuited to the factory work that women were taking up in place of men who were off fighting in the war—it’s no accident that Rosie the Riveter covers her hair with a bandana—and, according to Julie Summers in Fashion on the Ration, there were reports of women’s hair becoming dangerously tangled in the machines and equipment. This, then, was a problem. The solution? The US War Department approached Lake and requested she change her hairstyle. Lake was a product of Hollywood’s studio system and, as such, was probably used to men in high-ranking positions having strong opinions about her appearance. But even she might have been surprised to hear that the government “had some notes” on how she was doing her hair. Nevertheless, she obliged their request. In a public service announcement, she is filmed pinning her peekaboo hairstyle into a rolled updo. In a 1967 interview, she states that after her change of hairstyle, the accident rate in US factories was reduced by a staggering 25 percent. On the other hand, after she retired the peekaboo, Lake’s career stalled and her star waned.

For some women, joining the war effort meant changing their hair. For others, their hair was the war effort. Throughout the war, the US military worked to refine the bombsight, a device used by aircraft for dropping bombs accurately. Engineer Carl Norden eventually developed the Norden Bombsight by incorporating an analog computer, which allowed bombardiers to target bombs more quickly and precisely than ever before. In bombsights from this time, reticles, or crosshairs, were used to pinpoint the target and align the bomb’s trajectory. The US Air Force experimented in using a variety of fibers (human hair and cobweb included) as crosshairs. In 1941, the American War Department advertised a request for human hair that was blond, a minimum of eleven inches long, and had never been chemically treated, dyed, or curled. Their advertisements were soon answered with donations of women’s hair. Among the donations was hair belonging to Mary Babnik (later Mary Babnik Brown) of Pueblo, Colorado. Babnik’s hair was thirty-four inches long. Babnik refused any compensation for her donation, though she did say she “cried and cried” after she chopped it off. Babnik’s hair was reportedly used in making the crosshairs for Norden Bombers—though Babnik wouldn’t know this until 1987, when then-President Ronald Reagan wrote her a letter of thanks.

In Germany, too, virginal blond hair was suddenly a subject of national importance, albeit for different reasons. The Nazi party cast stereotypically blond Aryans as the “Master Race”; German media in the interwar period and throughout the war was saturated with images of blond women with their hair in milkmaidish braids or German-style rolls, and blond men whose hair is cut short at the back and sides, slicked and combed down, like Rolf’s in The Sound of Music. The natural, untreated aesthetic of these volkisch hairstyles aligns neatly with Hitler’s purported distaste for makeup and cosmetic treatments. (Women in allied countries often wore red lipstick in defiance of Hitler.) But the strict parameters for fashion and beauty limned by the Nazis were not merely based in Hitler’s predilections: Irene Guenther, in Nazi Chic, points out that the intervention of fascist regimes in the arenas of fashion and beauty work to construct rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity, reinforcing the strict roles men and women played within fascist systems. Of course, some Germans couldn’t conform to these standards, and others didn’t care to: Many upper-class women, including the wives of high ranking Nazis continued to have their hair treated, permed, and dyed throughout the war.

One set that eschewed government-approved hairstyles were the Swingjugend, a teen subculture devoted to swing music and dancing. Swing boys wore their hair long and loose, and often topped off the look with a Homburg hat. Swing girls, too, wore their hair loose, instead of rolling or braiding it, and often sported red lipstick and nail polish. Michael H. Kater states, in Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany, the Swingjugend were mobilized around music and dance and not any overt political agenda, but their actions were, nevertheless, radical. They continued listening to jazz music and swing dancing after both were outlawed by the Nazi party and, as a rule, declined to join the Hitler Youth.

In January of this year, I visited Auschwitz. The day was drizzly and I moved quickly between the barracks, now housing museum displays. One such display, behind glass and running along both walls of a long narrow room, is a Rapunzel-rope mass of human hair. While some Auschwitz inmates were deemed fit for labor, others were sent directly to the gas chambers on their arrival at the camp. After they were gassed, the hair was shorn from their corpses. This is the hair on display. There is some four thousand pounds of it, but these four thousand pounds make up only a small portion of the shorn hair. The rest was used by German textile manufacturers in the production of, for example, mattress stuffing, and rope. Looking at it, I felt myself raise a hand to my own rain-damp hair. I noticed other visitors doing the same. A man worried at the edges of his bald patch as he moved past the display.

Hair has a long memory. Even many years since it has been attached to a human head, it can preserve both genetic and chemical information. Case in point: a recent analysis of hair taken from the brush of Eva Braun, Hitler’s lover, suggests (though inconclusively) that she was descended from Ashkenazi Jews. And, despite Nazi efforts, as the war’s end approached, to dismantle and destroy the gas chambers at Auschwitz, evidence of the genocide committed there remains in the shorn hair of their victims. In 1945 the Krakow’s Institute for Forensic Medicine tested a sample of human hair from Auschwitz and found traces of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in the chambers. For some, this justifies the hair’s display. Others believe the hair should be treated as any other human remains and disposed of respectfully. The hair, now over seventy years old, sits where it is, slowly disintegrating.

After the war in Europe ended, at the same time as Allied forces were liberating the concentration camps, approximately 20,000 women across France had their hair publicly shaved as punishment for fraternizing with German soldiers during the French occupation—committing acts of collaboration horizontale. One of the perceived perks of sleeping with the enemy was the German soldiers’ access to hard-to-source luxuries: lipsticks, silk stockings, other small vanities. At the occupation’s end, collaborators had this perceived vanity turned against them. In addition to having their hair shorn, they were often painted with swastikas—sometimes even drawn on in lipstick. They were paraded through the streets before jeering crowds. In more than one instance, “collaborators” were also tarred and feathered. Collaborating was, of course, a catch-all term. Fraternizing with enemy soldiers? That was collaborating. Being a prostitute who sometimes took enemy soldiers as clients? That was collaborating. Being sexually assaulted by enemy soldiers? Well, that was often collaborating, too. Meanwhile, companies and organizations who had (less ambiguously) collaborated with the Vichy government and profited under its rule had their wartime slates discreetly wiped clean. Among these companies, ironically enough, was L’Oreal: Now a cosmetics giant, in 1945 the company was known as a world-leading producer of women’s hair dye.

The day after I went to Auschwitz, I visited a small gallery in Krakow, which housed the works and effects of a nineteenth-century Polish painter, Jan Metejko. I saw, behind glass, a jet-black bracelet fastened with a gold clasp. I thought, at first, it had been carved from something, maybe ebony. But it was made from knotted hair, fine and shiny and intricately woven. It was a mourning bracelet. Hair is serious and frivolous and intimate and public. It is an expression of identity, its forcible removal an assault on identity. But I had forgotten, until then, that hair was also a medium for mourning and remembering.